Light Up the Night (11 page)

When she reached bare skin, rather than throwing herself against it, she hesitated. A desecration of multiple scars ran across one of the most beautiful chests she'd ever seen. Two obvious bullet holes, one by his waist and another terrifyingly near his heart. A third, old one deep on his arm, just below the shoulder—the one Ralph of Detroit had given him. Thin white lines crisscrossed as if he'd been whipped or dragged over rough ground.

And one deep line that matched the scar across his face, as if a knife had been dragged diagonally down from his ear, over his chin, then sliced him from clavicle most of the way down his ribs below one breast.

Trisha looked slowly back up to his eyes, which watched her intently from just inches away.

Awaiting her reaction.

She didn't know what to think. She'd been all freaked out over a bullet that hadn't even penetrated her armor. He appeared to have been tortured and clearly been close to death several times.

At her continued inspection, he shrugged slightly as if to say, “It's who I am.”

She watched a shiver ripple over the skin as she stroked a single finger down the long line of the deep knife cut.

Then she leaned in and kissed it. The shiver turned into a soft groan that rippled across his magnificent chest.

It was the last sound they made.

***

Bill had never made love like this. He'd been with women who couldn't even hack it when he pulled off his shirt. Some had insisted on making love in the dark; some had quickly left. A few had been turned on by his scars, and truth be told, those were the ones that bothered him the most.

Trisha's simple kiss had both acknowledged the pain of earning them as well as what they meant about him. He'd been in harm's way; he would be again. That wasn't going to change.

And she accepted that in him.

By the time his head stopped spinning, she had removed his pants and shoes as well, until he stood naked before her while she remained fully clothed. He wasn't quite sure how that had happened. Or how he felt about that. Naked and exposed, but neither in a bad way. As if his true self was on display for the first time in his life.

In silence, she walked around him in the small room lit painfully bright by the single overhead bulb. Her hand never left his skin as she looked him over. Not like a slab of meat or a greedy lover, but rather like someone who wanted to know who he was. Who understood that he and his scars were not separable, but rather one was a part of the other.

When she returned to stand in front of him, she undressed slowly. Her clothes hadn't deceived. She was as trim as she appeared. Her breasts were small and high, but would have looked wrong on her frame if they were any bigger. Shoulders that showed strength, and a waist that flared to womanly hips that fit his hands perfectly when he rested them there.

She continued undressing until she revealed that her hair color was all natural and her legs really were that long and that amazing.

He swept her up into his arms and laid her upon the bed.

He turned off the glaring overhead.

She switched on the bedside reading lamp. Now she was a pattern of light and shadow, of perfect skin and infinite promise.

He lay down beside her on that Army-tight blanket and slowly traced his hand over her. She was so perfect, as if built of porcelain. But he'd seen her run, he'd seen her fly, and he'd seen her angry. This was definitely no china doll, but a woman.

Her body responded and twitched as he ran his hand over her many shapes. He continued until her body's reflexive moves of unfamiliarity with his touch shifted ever so slowly to moves of pleasure caused by a touch becoming known, then familiar.

He caressed her amazing form until she leaned into or rose against his hand wherever he moved it.

Bill traced a single fingertip over her ribs, outlining the still livid bruise where the bullet had hit her.

That's when he became aware that she was watching him. He'd become so fascinated by her body and her incredible responses to him that he'd just sort of assumed that her eyes had drifted shut.

He leaned down and kissed each eye on the lid so that she did shut them. Then he shifted his lips onto hers as he cupped his hands between her legs.

She thrust up against him, bruising his lips and straining against his hand.

Even as he drove her upward, she slid a finger along the big scar over his chest. When she came, she dug her short fingernails into his pecs and held on.

No inhibitions, no catty games: she simply gave herself to the sensations and held on to him. Bill wanted to do more, so much more, but he'd neither prepared for nor expected this.

When he finally let her come down, she shifted them around until he was lying on his back.

She reached over to the desk drawer, without leaving the bed or losing contact with him, and pulled out a small string of silvered packets.

He could just kiss her. So he did and she seemed to melt against him as their hands and mouths ranged over each other's bodies.

Trisha sheathed him, caressed him, then straddled him. She took him in, and when he would have thrust upward, she kept him in place with palms braced against his hipbones between her spread legs.

With one of those cool, long-fingered hands of hers, she reached up and brushed his eyes closed. Then she took him in so slowly that it was almost agony, exquisite agony.

All at once she relaxed and let him all the way in. At the same instant she nipped his chest with her teeth. She continued to tease him with her tongue and her hips until he knew he was done for. He placed his hands on her hips and drove up at the same moment she drove down.

The release hammered them both until they could do no more than shudder. Then, like a falling leaf, she slowly collapsed to lie full on his chest, her head nestled below his chin as he stroked her hair and back.

On the softest sigh, she seemed to fall asleep.

He'd never had an experience like this one. As he continued to brush a hand over her wondrous skin, his analytic brain began to kick in. He knew himself well enough to know that if he tried to stop it, his analysis would just kick into high gear. It was a survival mechanism, so he decided it was best to just let it go.

Why had it been so different with Trisha?

It wasn't that she was an amazingly skilled Mata Hari. She had done no more than any another woman might have done. Well, actually, there were a couple of immensely creative things she'd done that had made his eyes cross, but that wasn't what was confusing him.

And he didn't know her well enough for the deeper emotions to be engaged, if he even had any. He'd thought he'd been in love once or twice, but that was when he was ten and Tasha Yar had been on
Star
Trek
, not in the real world. Even at ten he knew the difference. And later, the Chicago whore who hadn't been able to pay the cash when he fixed her sink, but had paid him in the flesh for his first several experiences at fourteen. That no one had ever pulled any deeper emotions from him made him suspicious of their existence.

No, there was something different about Trisha O'Malley, and like so much else about her, it eluded him. Then he had it.

It was like the way she ran and the way she flew. It wasn't practiced at all. She made love as if it were totally natural.

As if what she did came straight from her heart.

***

It was funny; Trisha could practically hear Billy thinking as she lay upon him. She wondered what was running through his mind, but didn't want to ask. Half afraid he'd make up some line to cover his real thoughts.

Behind his words would be, “Damn! She was a good lay.” Or an easy one. Or…

But it hadn't felt that way. It had been life changing, as she somehow had known throughout the long week of mostly sleepless days that it would be. He'd now ruined her for any lesser lover. She hadn't treated men as disposable… Well, not quite. But the few, very few, that she had taken into her bed she certainly hadn't kept for long.

She'd thought Billy the SEAL should be too tall, too arrogant, too self-needy to treat a woman right. Instead, he'd found that perfect mix of gentle but strong, of attentive to her needs rather than first focusing on his own. And the way they fit together, she could lie here on his chest forever.

She opened one eye to study the expanse spread before her. This one shoulder was clean of injury, about the only part of him that was unblemished, front or back. Yet his scars had not made him ugly. Rather, it had made her feel even safer in his arms. As if he had held the world at bay just for her.

His hand slowly ceased stroking her, coming to rest hooked over her shoulder rather than cupping her butt as most men in his position would. His heartbeat slowed against her ear until she knew he slept.

Trisha closed her eyes tightly to keep back sudden tears that threatened to spill.

This one was really going to suck when it all came apart.

The storm had grown while they slept. What had been ugly flying the previous night had become a named tropical storm by mid-afternoon. Their naming system here was ARB for Arabian Sea and a number. But even if it wasn't named Ursula or Betty Boop, this storm was nasty. By the time they awoke in the evening, the storm still wasn't making landfall anywhere. Instead it was just boiling upward from the heart of the Arabian Sea.

Of course, that's when the call came in. An oil tanker, the
Sepeda
, registered out of Jakarta, was being chased by pirates. That meant the tanker crew had about ten minutes, perhaps twenty, before they were boarded.

The
Sepeda
was more than thirty minutes from the nearest help, which was aboard the USS
Peleliu.
Nobody even cleared their meal trays. They bolted from the middle of dinner in the officers' mess and raced up the various ship's ladders. Pilots and crew geared up. Teams hit the decks to untie the choppers. They'd been fully fueled and rearmed after the prior night's flight, so they were ready to go in minutes. There were so few aircraft aboard that they hadn't even had to fold back the rotors for everyone to fit on the flight deck, so there were no delays there.

The rain was pattering against the windscreen as Trisha climbed aboard. She felt loose and ready to go,
thank
you, Billy
. Roland slammed in beside her and threw the engine startup switches even as he buckled himself in. Two crewmen came up and quickly hung the doors and swung them shut. That would protect the chopper's electronics when they flew into weather, but suddenly the cockpit felt terribly small. More vulnerable than it did without the doors on.

Once they had the engine moving, Trisha began waking up the electronics: radar, night vision, radio.

Peleliu
command was giving a running commentary on status. “…is a quarter-million-ton VLCC traveling laden. She just took on one and a half million barrels of crude. She is not in convoy, but she does have a security force and a citadel. They are attempting to repel boarders and will then retreat if necessary. Crew of about twenty.”

Roland looked at her and grimaced before pulling on his helmet and snapping down the visor. He was right; no way this was going to be pretty.

A VLCC was a Very Large Crude Carrier. That meant about a hundred and fifty million dollars of oil on a sixty-million-dollar ship that was a thousand feet long, traveled at twenty miles per hour, and took an hour to make a turn. The ransom on that would be a record-breaker. “Not in convoy” meant she was stupid enough to try running these waters on her own, without military escort.

At least the oil tanker had an armed crew and a citadel.

“Don't get your hopes up,” Billy said over the radio from his position on the DAP. He'd clearly heard the last part. “They're now reporting two boats after them and poor visibility in thirty-foot waves. The weather may suck, but it could also be a life-or-drown motivation for the pirates to get aboard. The
Sepeda
's ‘army' is probably four guys with rifles and a couple fire hoses. Two boats probably means thirty to forty pirates with automatic weapons. Even with losses, they will take the deck. And it's a first-generation citadel.”

“Crap!” Roland said over the internal intercom.

Ships had taken to fortifying their command bridge. When attacked by pirates, everyone would pile into the citadel, seal the doors, and wait for rescue. Now that the criminal element had taken over piracy, being caught meant beatings, rape, or worse. Recently, one hostage was keel-hauled, a pre-twentieth-century British Navy punishment of running a line under the ship from side to side and then using it to drag some poor soul down one side and back up the other, usually slicing them near to death with the barnacles growing on the hull. When later rescued, the hostages said the pirates had “done it just for fun.”

The problem with the first generation of citadels was that the builders didn't think it through. Locking yourself in kept you from being shot—until the pirates targeted the main windows with .50 cal machine guns. Or fed smoke into the air vents or cut the power to your radios, then waited for you to run out of water, or… Armoring ship bridges had become a major industry, just another piece of the seven billion dollars a year that Somali piracy cost the global economy.

So, that meant the SOAR team had to fly through terrible weather and recapture a ship from a large group of desperate criminals before the out-of-date citadel was breached.

“Sounds like fun,” she told Roland.

She knew that, despite having his visor down, he was rolling his eyes at her. She glanced up-deck at the other Little Birds. This time the D-boys were climbing aboard, two per side on the benches. That was going to be an ugly ride out in the weather.

Then she saw two figures who couldn't be mistaken for anyone else, notwithstanding the red deck lights and the rain. They walked side by side to the
Merchant
. They moved the same, light on their feet, not one wasted motion. Each carried a long sniper rifle in their hands, a combat rifle across their backs, and more weaponry at their hips and in pouches. One was obviously Michael, trim and average in height, wearing the unique MICH helmet that all D-boys wore. The other loomed over him. Billy the SEAL.

They climbed onto the outside seat of Dennis's chopper and tied themselves in.

Trisha didn't know what to do with that. Her hands continued the preflight preparations, but her heart had not been ready to see Billy ready to jump in on the front lines. She'd never seen him fight, barely seen him run. Her mind had him safe, warm, and dry, tucked away in the back of the DAP Hawk
Vengeance.

He must have noticed her attention, because he gave a cheery salute. Michael looked at him, then over to her. She had no way to see Michael's expression and decided that was a good thing. She sent back a cheerful wave and turned to focus on the flight.

Which would be far easier if she could just breathe.

***

Bill was kind of glad that he and Michael didn't have an intercom circuit that only included the two of them. There was the general frequency for the flight and the Delta freq that Michael had provided when Billy volunteered to be on the insertion team.

There was no question about what they'd have to do. The pirates would definitely be aboard by the time they arrived. So they were going to have to take the battle to the deck and hope they beat the pirates to the citadel.

Michael hadn't even blinked at Bill's offer to go. He'd simply given him the frequency and gone back to putting on his gear. Bill was glad he'd drawn a full combat kit from the Quartermaster and was ready in time to walk beside Michael. It felt good to be geared up. The familiar weight of weapons, ammo, and various explosive ordnance was a comfort. He'd selected the FN-SCAR rifle that the Night Stalkers favored rather than the HK416 rifle that Michael chose to wear across his back. He'd chosen a Remington M24 SWS, Sniper Weapon System, rather than the HK-PSG1 the Delta Colonel carried. They didn't need to share a nod to read each other's approval of their weapons selection.

But as they sat shoulder to shoulder on the
Merchant
's bench seat, it was clear that he and Michael were going to have a talk when they got back to the
Peleliu.
Bill huffed out a breath and almost laughed. Well, no one had promised that anything to do with Trisha O'Malley was going to be simple.

He and Trisha had arrived separately to breakfast and sat apart, just as they had been all week. But he'd never been so aware of someone's position in the room before and of each thing they did, other than a team member or an unfriendly while on a mission. And maybe not even then. Although she sat behind him, each word she spoke, each laugh, had been like an echo locator to place her exactly among all of the people in the crowded mess room.

Her quick wave just before they lifted from the deck of the
Peleliu
had heartened him. It had been so good between them, and it clearly wasn't affecting her on this mission. Not in a hundred years would he have guessed that she was avoiding him because of that first kiss. Well, the second one had sure stamped “Paid” on that one.

They were halfway to the
Sepeda
when word came that the pirates were aboard and the crew was falling back into the citadel. Give the Somalis maybe ten minutes to all get aboard and discover that the crew had locked itself away. That would draw all of their concentration toward the stern conning tower for a little bit, so maybe the pirates wouldn't have guards posted yet by the time the choppers arrived.

A sharp jerk against the belt around his waist drew his attention back to the weather. They were definitely headed into the storm. The rain drummed off his helmet, and visibility was zero. He missed the ADAS gear that projected the images directly to his visor. They'd let him wear it when he'd been aboard the
Vengeance
and spoiled him for life. But it required that he stay wired to the chopper's camera system, and tonight he needed to be mobile. He flipped down the night-vision goggles and toggled them on.

That was little better. In the narrow range of the binocular elements, he could see the night world as a thousand shades of green. The other choppers in the flight cast bright lines, clear enough that he could even make out the figures behind the windows by their body heat. The waves passing fifty feet below them were a roiling mess with little definition. If they had to ditch in that, they'd be in serious trouble. What had been twenty-foot rollers last night were thirty-foot chaos tonight. Not so far below his dangling boots, breakers crashed against each other. High wind ripped spume off the top of every whitecap.

They'd have canceled tonight's patrol, at least in this direction, if it weren't for the
Sepeda.
How much worse did it have to get before they'd call back the choppers? Any outfit other than the Night Stalkers would already have grounded their fleet. The
Peleliu
was turned and driving toward the storm in case a rescue was needed, but in this sea there was little chance of that succeeding.

Trisha's attack Little Bird flew along right beside them, and he took some comfort knowing she was there. Not that she was likely to be much help in tonight's operation.

He was starting to wonder if he should speak up, when Michael's voice sounded calmly over the general frequency. His voice was as steady as if he still sat in the Lieutenant Commander's office aboard the
Peleliu
, rather than being slammed around on a hard wooden seat while rain and wind drove against him at over a hundred miles per hour.

“Okay, here's the plan.”